Ever since Ecto broke on my computer, I seem to be unable to get any sort of blogging rhythm going on.

It’s really quite lame, really, since one day it just stopped. I didn’t do anything, or change any settings, and still, borked. And I’ve been too busy/lazy (pick one) to actually head over to the forums and get an answer to my problem.

I don’t even know if I can think up anything good to blog about at this point. I mean, I could talk about the essay I just wrote (working title: Dante & Alice–BFF), the essay I’m about to start (working title: Why Hawthorne is a Hack–Shakespeare’s Fool in The Scarlet Letter), the group project M is doing all the work on because she’s run out of stuff to do in her other classes (working title: Jasper Fford the Genious–The Appearance of Legendary Characters in Modern Literature), or the Nutrition project I probably should spend time on (sorry, no working title).

But, all that stuff is rather boring.

Today, though, M and I were talking about a quirk unique to English majors. Imagine having someone say to you:

I just finished this book. You should read it. I really hated it.

If you’re an English major, you’ll ask them to hand the book over, and you’ll read it, trying to figure out why someone hated it when the story really isn’t half bad.

Why do we do this? To some, it may seem like we enjoy torturing ourselves. It’s a reasonable assumption, after all. We do read some stuff we hate (cough…shakespeare…cough) in the course of our studies, but it’s more than that.

You have to read what people hate, to see what makes a story so bad. I think it goes double for those who write, because they want to make sure that they don’t fall into the same trap, and have people going around telling other people that their book was horrible.

And so we read bad books. And in my case, I actively look for them. The worst, the better.

What book have you read, that you thought was absolute crap, and why?

- “Narcolepsy,” Third Eye Blind: Third Eye Blind